Jailed defendants found mentally incompetent to stand trial are waiting far too long to be sent to the state's lone facility that provides care to restore their ability to assist in a defense, according to a lawsuit filed Monday on behalf of an Orleans Parish inmate and a disability-rights organization.

Once a judge finds a particular defendant cannot assist in his defense or understand the court proceedings, the case against him is essentially frozen and the state is required to provide mental health services so that person eventually can be tried.

The restoration of defendants' mental competency is either done in jail for a maximum treatment period of 90 days or, when problems are more serious, at the Feliciana Forensic Facility, an institution in Jackson.

In a lawsuit filed in federal court by the American Civil Liberties Union, the Advocacy Center, a nonprofit group that advocates for the elderly and people with disabilities, maintains that too many inmates who judges believe need in-patient treatment wait months -- if not years -- before they are sent to the Feliciana facility.

A Caddo Parish inmate, for example, has been waiting to go to Feliciana since Aug. 13, 2008, while an inmate in the St. Tammany Parish jail has been in limbo since Oct. 25, 2007, according to a list provided to the Advocacy Center in October 2009. The average wait time in Louisiana for an inmate to go to the facility was 195 days, or more than six months, the lawsuit stated.

The lawsuit also highlights the case of "W.B.," an Orleans Parish Prison inmate charged last September with armed robbery and attempted murder who has been waiting to be transferred to Feliciana since October 2009.

W.B. believes that "little men" visit him while he sleeps and does not know why he is in jail, according to the lawsuit -- which asks a federal judge to require that inmates such as W.B. be transferred to Feliciana within seven days of a finding they can't stand trial.

The Department of Health and Hospitals, which runs the Feliciana institution, released a statement stating that the agency is trying to move away from providing the bulk of the state's mental health care in large institutions.

House Bill 462, for example, would restrict admission to Feliciana to people charged with serious felonies. Defendants awaiting trial on a drug crime or misdemeanor who are found not competent to stand trial and are not helped by 90 days of jail-based treatment would either receive more jail-based treatment or be released for outpatient treatment.

But in the lawsuit, the ACLU argues that the parish jails often aren't suitable environments for defendants to receive proper mental health care. The lawsuit noted that in Orleans Parish, a U.S. Department of Justice investigation singled out mental health care at the jail as not meeting constitutional standards.

"There is a pretty significant difference between the services provided at Feliciana and jail," said Katie Schwartzmann, an attorney with the ACLU. The New York-based law firm Kirland & Ellis LLP also participated in filing the lawsuit, which was assigned to U.S. District Judge Sarah Vance.